The Clark County School District called a snow day in Las Vegas. I am not messing with you. Here’s the official word from the CCSD website:

Due to weather conditions and for the safety of students, all Clark County School District schools will be closed today. Students should not report to campus.

“Weather conditions.” They mean snow and ice. It snowed a good portion of the day yesterday, and yes, a few inches stuck to the ground in the valley’s higher elevations. But guess of what there was no sign when I woke up this morning:

My Matrix needs a coat

Snow.

Right. CCSD called a snow day, but there’s no snow. No rain. No inclement weather. What?

Admittedly, I fall in with that group of Las Vegans who grew up somewhere with a wider range of weather changes, a place where a foot or two of snow getting dumped a few times a year wasn’t unheard of. I spent a lot of early winter mornings as a child lying in bed with the radio on, listening to the announcer slowly list off the school closures for the day, hoping and praying my school would soon be called. If not, there was still at least six inches of snow and ice-covered sidewalks outside waiting for my booted feet to trudge through on the way to class.

So I’m understandably befuddled that schools in the Las Vegas area are closed today. I guess because there is no established notification system, given inclement weather in Southern Nevada is so rare, CCSD couldn’t wait until this morning to determine whether or not it was safe for students and buses to travel valley roads, but … I am nonetheless stunned. Especially because when I was 12, there was a significant snow storm here in Vegas, enough so that about six inches packed on the ground. We’re talking snowmen and snowball fights. But was school canceled?

Hell no.

It kind of makes me wonder what’s happened to our society – or at least the microcosm of Las Vegas – in the last 20 years to make the powers-that-be so paranoid. Probably the same paranoia that urges families to live behind gates and walls on the outer edge of the city. But that’s a topic for another time.